Not too Posh to push pop: when music rocks theatre

LMFAO's I'm Sexy and I Know It, Labyrinth, Wearing my Rolex … Few theatre shows have used contemporary music with the savviness of Laura Wade's play Posh. Why aren't there smarter soundtracks on stage?

Singing for their supper ... Lyndsey Turner's initial production of Posh at the Royal Court theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

On paper, a Bullingdon Club-styled set of toffs performing an a cappella breakdown of LMFAO's I'm Sexy and I Know It sounds like the sort of cringeworthy event you might expect to see on The X Factor – probably during the audition stages. It shouldn't work on a West End stage. It definitely shouldn't be saved on the frontal lobes of my brain, cheerily downloading in my mind every time I hear the song drifting from car radios. But in Lyndsey Turner's production of Posh, first seen at London's Royal Court in 2010 and now revised and revived at the Duke of York's, she and musical director James Fortune pull off the rarest of tricks in (non-musical) theatre: making clever, creative use of contemporary pop music in a play. And doing it really well.

"The idea was to [use the songs] to charm an audience, regardless of your views on the characters' politics," says Henry Lloyd Hughes, who plays Dimitri Mitropoulus. And it works: watching a set of posh boys, complete with tailcoats and floppy fringes, sing Barbershop versions of Labyrinth and Maroon 5, trying to convince us they've "got the moo-ooh-ooh-ooves like Jagger", is an arch, deftly ironic touch. That it's also so dramatically effective is credit to both Turner's wit and Fortune's skill.

But it's not always the director making a call on how to amp up a script with a score. Lloyd-Hughes tells me that when he did Punk Rock at the Lyric Hammersmith a few years back, it was the playwright – Simon Stephens – who had all the say. "When the script arrived, it came with a compilation on what Simon titled the history of American punk. He was very clear, in an almost Disney-style, that you should be listening to this song now, at this point of the play. He was even very specific about the volume. Needless to say, it was not quiet."

But is Stephens such an anomaly for the stage? Plenty of playwrights I've met are music nuts, so why aren't more writing their soundtrack choices into their plays? And if they're not, why aren't more directors referencing wider contemporary culture to contextualise their productions?

Which brings me to my next point: I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard the music used in a production energise and make sense of the original text (in Posh's case, I'd argue that it out-and-out improves it). And I'd lose all my fingers and toes trying to name the many shows where it's just an awkward attempt at striking a contemporary chord – a bit like your English teacher rapping at you. Several years on, the memory of Ophelia "rocking out" to the Strokes, as directed by Trevor Nunn, still makes me wince. And then there's the xx, A band that were to theatre in 2010 what Adele was to TV talent shows in 2011: overused, misjudged and – even in the case of another brilliant Hamlet – failing to register anything like the original power their songs command.

But maybe it's just me. Maybe I take all that diegetic music, symbolically referencing the narrative shtick yadda yadda, too seriously. But then I think about that scene in Jerusalem, where Byron's dance with the elusive, missing girl Phaedra, soundtracked by Fairport Convention, pushed many people around me to tears. Or of the pulsing urgency of Nick Bicat's specially composed tracks for Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm. And then, of course, there's Posh's rendition of Wiley's Wearing My Rolex – a track that was used in the original production, but since dropped (the new version has seen its playlist updated too). A grime anthem composed on the mean streets of inner-city London sung in a country pub by characters seemingly rich enough to own a dozen Rolexes? It's still hands down the smartest (and funniest) use of pop music I've seen on stage.